Peter Thilly, Assistant Professor of History, has received a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year from the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies to work on his book manuscript, Opium and Capitalism on the Chinese Maritime Frontier.

Professor Thilly’s book provides a social history of the “opium century” – the one hundred years during which opiate narcotics dominated the Chinese economy and became normalized within Chinese society. By focusing on the criminal brokers who operated the drug trade, it tells overlapping stories about the local experiences of global imperialism, nationalism, statebuilding and corruption. The people who dealt in drugs, over the course of the opium century, he argues, carved out a particular capitalist version of local power in the face of encroaching, modernizing states. In so doing, drug traders transformed the processes of nation-building and imperialism in China.

The Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies seeks to maintain the vitality of China Studies in the US and Canada through fellowships and grants designed primarily for scholars early in their careers. Postdoctoral fellowships support scholars in preparing their PhD dissertation research for publication or in embarking on new research projects. This program is made possible by a generous grant from The Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Joshua Howard, Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies, has received a residential fellowship at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies for the 2019-2020 academic year.

His project, “New China Daily: Social Change and the Class Project in Wartime Nationalist China” is the first study of the Chinese Communist press and its relationship to social change and labor during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and postwar labor movement. Broadening our perspective beyond a history of military conflict, political and institutional change, he argues that the Anti-Japanese War induced social change and working-class formation in Nationalist China’s cities, that was both reflected and facilitated by the New China Daily (Xinhua ribao).

The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for curiosity-driven basic research. Since 1930, it has served as a model for protecting and promoting independent inquiry, prompting the establishment of similar institutes around the world, and underscoring the importance of academic freedom worldwide.

The Institute’s mission and culture have produced an exceptional record of achievement. Among its present and past Faculty and Members are 33 Nobel Laureates, 42 of the 60 Fields Medalists, and 18 of the 20 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners. Past Faculty have included Albert Einstein, one of its first Professors who remained at the Institute until his death in 1955, and distinguished scientists and scholars such as Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Hetty Goldman, Homer A. Thompson, John von Neumann, George Kennan, Hermann Weyl, and Clifford Geertz.

Jacob Ferguson is the winner of the 2018-2019 Franklin Riley prize for best undergraduate paper for his work on “Paternalism and Property Rights in the Slaveholding South: F.A.P. Barnard’s Trial at the University of Mississippi, White Southerners, and Slave Testimonies.” This prize, which was decided by an awards committee consisting of Professors Rebecca Marchiel (chair), Garrett Felber, and Eva Payne, comes with a $250 award.

Ferguson’s paper, which was completed for Professor Anne Twitty’s HST 498: Slavery and Its Legacies at the University of Mississippi during Fall 2018, asks why and to what extent white southerners and slave owners listened to slave testimonies. His entry point into this examination is the rape of Jane, an enslaved woman claimed by University of Mississippi Chancellor F.A.P. Barnard, who was attacked by a white student in 1859. Though the Board of Trustees found the accused student legally not guilty, Barnard had the student’s guardians withdraw him from the university, which led to questions among university faculty and prominent community members about whether Barnard was sound on the slavery question. Eventually, Barnard’s decision to take the word of a slave over that of a white student led to a second trial to determine where Barnard’s loyalties lay, and Barnard’s eventual resignation. Ferguson then considers a variety of situations in which enslaved people commanded an audience, including moments when masters were expected to listen to and respond to slave complaints. In discussing these circumstances at length, it arrives at a more nuanced understanding of the traditional master-slave relationship and what it meant to be a respected southern slave master.

Kaimara Herron is the winner of the 2018-2019 Tennin-Alexander Prize for the best non-thesis graduate history paper for her work on “‘In the Hands of Responsible Persons’: Social Services, Memory, and Politics in the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1904-1942.” This prize, which was decided by an awards committee consisting of Professors Rebecca Marchiel (chair), Garrett Felber, and Eva Payne, comes with a $750 award.

Herron’s paper, which was completed for Professor Darren Grem’s HST 702: Research – US from Civil War to Present, demonstrates the centrality of Black clubwomen to 19th century postbellum politics. Building upon Elsa Barkley Brown’s insight that Black women’s formal political exclusion did not equal marginalization from informal political influence through collective community politics, Herron argues that these clubwomen’s activism cannot not be reduced to “racial uplift.” By tracing two of the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs’ projects – the Old Folks Home in Vicksburg, MS and the Margaret Murray Washington Home for Juvenile Delinquents near Clinton, MS – Herron shows how memory work and the politics of space were used in the absence of formal policymaking channels. For example, while white women used social and political capital to reshape the physical landscape of the New South with confederate monuments, school curricula, and venerations of the Lost Cause, the MSFCWC reclaimed and renovated antebellum homes intended for the formerly enslaved to create spaces of care and remembrance. Both the Old Folks Home and the Juvenile Home challenged and recast the Lost Cause narrative through a contested politics of space and memory. Through such projects, Black clubwomen in Mississippi engaged in a nuanced form of political engagement not easily reduced to racial uplift or respectability politics.